Rohan Silva: When charity begins at start-ups - and changes the world

Help Refugees: the charity quickly became the number-one provider of assistance in Calais and Dunkirk Jeremy Selwyn

In 1965, an engineer named Gordon Moore made a prediction. He was working in Silicon Valley and could see first-hand how computer chips were getting more powerful with every passing year. He boldly predicted that this trend would continue, and that for decades to come, the processing power of computers would double every two years or so.

Amazingly, this forecast has proved to be unerringly accurate over the past 50 years. So much so in fact that people in the technology industry don’t even refer to it as a prediction. Instead they call it Moore’s Law.

When you double something repeatedly, the numbers involved quickly get extremely large, which is the reason why the smartphone in your pocket today is vastly more powerful than the computers that NASA used to put a man on the moon in 1969.

The inexorable march of Moore’s Law has had a huge impact on our economy. From retail to advertising, and banking to property, ever more advanced technologies are upending old ways of doing business.

According to Yale University academic Richard Foster, back in the 1920s —before the dawn of the digital age — the average life-expectancy of a private-sector corporation was around 70 years. Today, at a time of accelerating technological progress, the average life span has fallen to just 15 years, as new technologies make it easier than ever before for start-ups to reach global audiences, scale rapidly and out-compete venerable big businesses.

What’s fascinating is that this disruptive innovation is reaching the field of international development and charity work. Right now there’s a new generation of not-for-profit start-ups using technology to achieve great things —often in a lower-cost and more effective way than big and old-fashioned (but well-meaning) aid organisations.

As in so many other areas, this is one where London is leading the world.

Look at Help Refugees, for example, which was founded here in September 2015. It’s a great case study in how an entrepreneurial charitable start-up can have an outsized impact. Within just one month of launching, Help Refugees was the number-one provider of assistance to refugee camps in Calais and Dunkirk. Today it’s funding 50 projects across Europe and has been able to get support to refugees more quickly and cheaply than big established aid agencies.

'There’s a new generation of not-for-profit start-ups using technology to achieve great things'

Rohan Silva

Or check out Videre, which uses cutting-edge technology to create hidden recording devices so that human rights activists can record abuses and mobilise public pressure. They may only have a tiny team but their world-leading mastery of digital tools means they’re achieving weightier results than better-funded and better-known charities.

The same goes for Spitalfields-based Moonshot CVE, which is harnessing data analytics and algorithms to fight online extremism and combat the spread of terrorist ideologies.

No matter what sector you’re in, running a start-up is never easy. For insurgents in international development, a major challenge is accessing the £12 billion annual government aid budget, because the lion’s share goes to the big organisations that know how to lobby politicians and navigate public-sector bureaucracy.

That’s a real shame. If we get behind London’s brilliant international development start-ups, our city can have an even bigger impact on the world around us. That’s not a prediction — it’s a fact.